For a taste of Pekingese colloquial and a slice of traditional life in Beijing, I offer this 4 minutes and 24 seconds rap video entitled "běi jīng tǔ zhù 北京土著 (Beijing Natives)":

Here follow a transcription and translation of the entire song. One thing that will be immediately evident is the fondness of Beijingers for adding final retroflex -r to the end of many words. There seems, however, to be some disagreement among individual speakers on when to -r, as it were, and when not to -r. Our transcription distinguishes three categories of -r: bold for when the singer adds an -r that is not in the original lyrics, italics for when he fails to -r but we think he should, and regular -r when the original lyrics have an -r. Sometimes the -r is subtle and sometimes it is very obvious; given the complexities of the phenomenon, we cannot guarantee that we've recorded all of them to the satisfaction of Pekingese aficionados.

Please also note that some of the tones and occasionally the vowel quality differ from what we would normally expect in Modern Standard Mandarin. The fact that it's a song also means that the contours of the melody sometimes are at odds with the tones.

Finally, the singer uses a few English expressions, so those appear both in the column with the Chinese lyrics and in the column with the translation. And there's at least one Pekingese morpheme (DER) in the lyrics for which there's no known character.

切一片西瓜四五两
qiē yí piànr xīgua sì-wǔ liǎng

Slice me a piece of watermelon, about four or five liangi

真正的薄皮脆沙瓤儿
zhēnzhèng de bó pí cuì shārángr

Only the truly thin-skin watermelon comes with this crisp and grainy texture

当四合院儿的茶房飘着茉莉花儿香
dāng sìhéyuànr de cháfáng piāozhe mòlìhuār xiāng

When the scent of jasmine wafts in the tea room of the siheyuanii

夏天的炎热全部被遗忘掉
xiàtiān de yánrè quánbù bèi yíwàng diào

One forgets all the heat of the summer

酌一杯佳酿漂远方
zhuó yì bēi jiāniàng piāo yuǎnfāng

Pour a glass of fine wine as your thoughts wander afar

胡同儿里酒香醉人肠hútòngr lǐ jǐuxiāng zuì rén cháng

The senses are drunk with the fragrance of the wine steeped within the hutong alleys

当老城角儿的夕阳回荡拨浪鼓儿响
dāng lǎo chéngjiǎor de xīyáng huídàng bōlànggǔr xiǎng

As the sun sets at the corner of the old city wall that echoes with the beat of the toy rattle-drum

北京的土著有一点点感伤
Běijīng de tǔzhù yǒu yìdiǎndiǎn gǎn-shāng

This native Beijinger feels a little sad

我一个人儿蹲在墙根儿没人der
wǒ yí gè rénr dūn zài qiánggēnr méi rén der

Squatting alone at the corner of the wall, receiving not even a passing glance

24 Comments

Rubrick said,

Philip Spaelti said,

Is it just me, or did someone just reformat this table (thank you), but then in the process unfortunately kill all the italic and bold 儿s?[(myl) Yes, sorry, that was me. It should be fixed now, subject to Victor's checking.]

Thanks for the great clip and careful transcription, Victor. It seems to be a fact of written convention that only a few of even the most common 儿 are included when writing, even when attempting to write in Beijing dialect.

There's another phonetic phenomenon that even those who don't follow Mandarin can hear in this piece: the lack of n-closing on the last /n/ of "consideration." Somebody can shoot me for getting the technical term wrong, but by "n-closing" I mean the tongue closing off all passage of air through the oral cavity in making the N.

Beijingers (and maybe most Mandarin speakers??) do not close the N as completely as English speakers at the end of most syllables. The resultant n-sound feels kind of "lazy" or "loose" to English-speakers' ears. In the case of the singer saying "consideration" right after two consecutive rhyming shēns, you can get a taste of it.

I see italics and bold on the English side, but not on the Chinese side.

[(myl) It was missing for a while, but the italics/bold stuff is definitely there now in Chinese, and I think it was there when you posted this comment — is it possible that you have a font problem of some kind?]

Of possible interest on the subject of rhotacization are two recent articles by Qing Zhang (now of U of Arizona): A Chinese Yuppie in Beijing: Phonological variation and the construction of a new professional identity (Language in Society 34) and Rhotacization and the 'Beijing Smooth Operator': The social meaning of a linguistic variable (J Sociolinguistics 12).

Jongseong Park said,

Yes and no. 儿 is used as a zhuyin fuhao (or bopomofo) character to represent 'er', but it is also a Chinese character in its own right.

儿, read as 'ren2', means 'human' and is one of the Kangxi radicals.

However, in modern China, 儿 is used as the Simplified Chinese version of 兒 meaning 'child' and is read 'er2'. This is where the zhuyin fuhao character comes from, I think. Since it has the same form as the zhuyin fuhao symbol and as a full-fledged Chinese character, it doesn't seem out of place to use alongside the Chinese characters to indicate the -r.

Jongseong Park said,

Hmm. I see that none of my Chinese dictionaries (as opposed to Chinese character dictionaries) don't show that reading at all, either.

However, my Korean Chinese character dictionary (Dong-A Hyeondae Han-Han Sajeon) lists 儿 as a Kangxi radical and calls it 'walking human in (걷는 사람 인)'. I've also heard it refered to as 'benevolent human in (어진 사람 인)', with the same Korean adjective that is usually used for the meaning of 仁 (ren2 in Chinese).

The dictionary explains that 'walking human' refers to the small seal script form of 儿. It is distinguished from the 'standing human' form of 人 (ren2), which is the usual Chinese character for 'human' as David Marjanović mentions and is itself another Kangxi radical. The dictionary goes on to explain that in China, the character is now used as the simplified form of 兒, as everyone here knows by now.

This must be one of those cases where a little-used character with few strokes takes on a new role as the simplified form of a different, more common character, and no one remembers that the new simplified form happened to be a different character in its own right before.

I'm a relative newbie at studying Chinese. I've been learning on my own and with people who teach me Chinese while I teach them English, as well as at a Chinese School for children on Sunday afternoons (I was able to convince the American parents of adopted Chinese children that their time would be better spent in a classroom learning the language than in the hallway waiting for their 小儿. Which brings me back to 儿…

We've learned it in a few words. Some of which it is a regular suffix, like:

Also, a very common word that changes its meaning with the addition of 儿 is

这 (zhè), which most commonly means means "this" and is often used like "这个xxx" (zhège, meaning "this one"). When you add the 儿, it becomes 这儿 (zhèr). This is most often used to mean "here" and is combined with 在 (zài) to mean "located here" as opposed to 在那儿 (zài nàr) which means "located over there".

I hope this helped somebody. I don't know if everybody knows all this already. Have a good one.

Other times, though, you see it as a variant, which is undoubtedly just a way of signifying the Beijing dialect. Examples include:

J. Taliaferro said,

I found this post via Google after watching a video about Chinese rap singers having different points of view on whether to rap in Mandarin or in their own Chinese language or dialect (both referred to as dialect in the videos). (Part II of the video) I didn't even think about whether this was an issue for Beijing performers, but there you are.